Observation vs. information

There's the difference between "information" and "observation."

An alert letting you know it's raining outside is information. Standing outside getting hit by drops of water under gray clouds while your brain melts from the earthy aroma, that's observing.

Both can be summed up as "it's raining outside." On a multiple guess test, you'd be hard-pressed to separate the two--but it matters.

Here's a piece of information--that rainy day smell comes from geosmin, and chemists draw it like this:

"Geosmin" means "earth smell"--that's information.
Letting a child dance under the first raindrops of a late May rainfall, letting her sniff the ethereal aroma, that's observing.

If a child is to have any hope understanding the natural world, she first need to observe it.

Yeah, ethereal is the wrong adjective there--
chemists use it to mean related to ethyl ether. That would be information.

Elementary science lesson

I love my Newton's cradle, and various versions have amused me for decades now. Harrod's popularized them as desktop toys way back when, but not because they're scientifical.

They're just plain fun.

They're also as obvious as the nose on a polar bear's face. Five balls banging against each other, in unexpected yet predictable and repeatable ways.

Just don't use the words inertia or force, or, Zeus forbid, Newton's Third Law.

Give a pair of children a Newton's cradle. Hold up a ball (or let one of them do it), and let it fall.
Hold up two, and do the same.

Have the children take turns predicting what will happen.

Then put the toys away for a few days.

No worksheets. No quizzes. No fancy words. Just a piece of the universe delivered unadulterated to the few minds left on Earth capable of seeing things for what they simply are.

Newton's cradle by DemonDeluxe via Wikiedia, unde CC

Open letter to elementary school teachers everywhere

Dear Elementary School Teachers and Principals,

I know you have an impossible job, and I know you're getting hammered from 73 different angles, and I know the last person you need to hear from is another high school teacher sitting on his throne blaming you for every ill that ever afflicted humans.

Your students worship you. Every casual word that slips from your lips influences the variegated connection of neurons that forms a child's view of the world. A child's obvious misconceptions get corrected early and often, and that is great!

You've done a wonderful job convincing them spectacularly difficult things to accept are true. My lambs come to me believing that the Earth is round and that is spins, that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, that humans arrived long after the dinosaurs left.

It's the subtle stuff, though, that slips by:

• Winter has nothing to do with how close the Earth is to the sun.
• Oxygen does not get converted into carbon dioxide.
• Plants do not get most of their mass from dirt.
• Food is not energy.
• Energy does not recycle.

Most of you know these things, and most of you are too busy prepping the children for their NCLB-driven tests to spend much time on science, and that's OK.

If you are going to spend time on science, though, please be wary of glib explanations that will confound a child's true understanding just a few years down the line.

Language matters far more than facile explanations of the natural world. Unless you know what energy is, and I got to tell you that I do not, do not pretend a 7 year old can master this. Unless you can explain a concept accurately without using science jargon, do not pretend your lambs will get it.

My students are amazed water comes out of flame, something easily demonstrated at any level of public education, yet accept that the Earth is round at face value, because you, the most powerful person in this child's life outside of family (and sadly occasionally including family), said so.

Your words carry the power of Cassandra, and like her words, can easily be confused, even when you speak the truth. I envy your power. Please don't abuse it.

Your Colleague,

Michael Doyle

A scatalogical myth

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

Genesis 3:19 KJV

I teach high school biology. I happen to love teaching, and I enjoy learning how things work, but many of my lambs come to high school with some deep misconceptions that skew their world view.

It's mid-January, a busy time of year, but I need to take a few moments to talk to my colleagues at the elementary school level.

Psssst...you, yeah, you....come a little closer.....poop is not digested food.

The food that gets chopped into bits tiny enough to enter cells either ends up as part of you or exits as part of your breath (CO₂) or your water.

When you diet, most of the you you lose is lost as carbon dioxide, bits of you lost with every exhaled breath. Some is lost as water, some as urea, but most of it gets cast off with each breath. I once lost 60 pounds, breath by breath by breath.

Why does this matter?

It gets the knee-high crowd thinking of mass ("stuff") as something other than solids. It complicates the whole food to poop business.

Trees are massive hunks of stuff made mostly of carbon dioxide drawn in through tiny holes in their leaves. We're massive hunks of stuff made from the stuff we eat, stuff mostly put together by plants.

Carbon dioxide to food to carbon dioxide again.

Thou art carbon dioxide, and to carbon dioxide shalt thou return.

OK, bile comes from RBC's, which were once food--but this does little more than give poop its lovely colors.

Elementary science: playing with fire

Fire is obvious, so it seems. Pretty much every child recognizes the flame of butane lighter is the same as the flames on the stove or on a lit candle.

A child sees that a fire makes solids things smaller. The grown-ups tell children that fire consumes, that the logs burned up, that fire reduces things to ash.

And pretty much every adult who believes this still lives in the world of alchemy, hoping to turn lead into gold.

My September sophomores know what fire is, no surprise, since September sophomores know everything there is to know about anything.

Before I ever say the words respiration or calorie, I ask them about fire—a few look confused (a good sign in science class), but most give me a knowing smile—they know what it is, they “just can’t put it into words” and when they do, they describe the properties of fire. Not a bad start.

I ask them what you need for a fire, and they know that—fuel, oxygen, something to light it—somewhere in elementary school they learned about the fire triangle.

I then pretend to take out a box full of pure oxygen, and ask them what would happen if I lit a match in it.

***

Most of my sophomores know the photosynthesis/respiration equation before they get to my class:

C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂ => 6CO₂ + 6H₂O with energy released

Sugar + oxygen combined releases carbon dioxide and water

CO₂ + H₂O => C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂ with energy captured

The kids love writing down equations, it gets them feeling all sciency, and now the stupid teacher isn’t asking stupid questions about stupid fire expecting answers that “can’t be put into words.”

The inevitable “Do we have to know this?” comes from the back corner of the classroom—always the same back corner—but I pretend I don’t hear.

I hold up my propane torch—even the back corner crowd notices now. I promise them I will light it in a minute, but they have to answer a simple couple of questions first. What do I need to make it work. (“Well, duh…”), and what is H2O (“Well, duh…” with an advanced eye roll).

I write the equation for the combustion of propane on the board—it’s similarity to the respiration/photosynthesis equations is glaringly obvious, but not a point I care to make at the moment.

C₃H₈ + 5O₂ => 3CO₂ + 4H₂O

I ask what comes out of the propane torch after the propane as the propane is burned. I consistently get two answers—fire and carbon dioxide. I never get water. I’ve asked hundreds of kids the question, with the equation sitting up on the board, and it’s like H2O is some mysterious stuff stuck to the equation just to make it balanced. The stuff is pretty mysterious when you get down to it.

After our list of stuff that comes out of the torch is made—usually CO2, heat, light, flame, and occasionally propane—I light the torch.


I pass the torch over a cool piece of glass—it could be a large beaker—then pass it over the cool stem of the faucet. The students see the flash of water vapor on the glass. They know it looks like "fog” — but no one wants to say it. It makes no sense. Water from fire? It must be a trick.

To be fair, it pretty much gobsmacks me, too, each time I do this.

And of course, water does not come from fire—it comes from the hydrogen in the propane and the oxygen in the air. Turns out we’re all closet alchemists. We cannot accept the obvious.

***

Chemistry hit puberty  when Antoine LaVoisier realized that fire consumes nothing—it only transforms. If you figure out the amount of stuff with and compare it to the stuff you end up with, it has the same mass.

Exactly the same mass.

All the heat and light and noise that escaped from the dancing flame took nothing away. Energy has no mass, no inertia, no stuff to it. It's not nothing, but it's not mass, either.

So what do we teach a young child about fire? Let them observe a candle, let them see the water rise from the flame, let them cover it with a glass and see the flame die, let them wonder.

Matchstick photo by Sebastian Ritter via Wikipediaa under CC.

Stuff matters: more thoughts on elementary curriculum

Many children (and quite a few adults) don’t think of air as matter. It’s invisible, seemingly immune to gravity, has no taste, makes no sound. When you light a match, it burns up and disappears into “thin air.”

This is a problem.

***

The stuff of matter, the stuff of stuff, seems simple--we mostly rush through it in science class, assuming everyone knows what “matter” is, because, well, it's so simple, and then we expect students to grasp all kinds of nonsense labeled “science.”

The typical school definition of matter is "any substance which has mass and occupies space," a deceptively complex answer. Most students equate matter (or "stuff") with mass, and with it lose any chance of truly appreciating the physical sciences. (Oh, they'll muddle through using algorithms, and such, might even ace an introductory physics course, but they won’t touch the physics again.)

Mass is the quality of stuff that resists change. (More precisely, mass is the measure of inertia in stuff, but I'll leave that be for the moment.) How do we know something has mass? If you push it, it pushes back.*

This is a big deal. Inertia is a huge concept, really the whole shebang of introductory Newtonian physics, and ultimately the basis of the interesting bits of classic chemistry and biology.  Inertia is what makes mass mass, and without mass, we have no physical universe. (The “take up space” part of matter only makes sense if you grasp what mass is—otherwise, it’s superfluous.)

How much time did you spend on this as a student? As a teacher?

Let’s go back to a child—how can a 7 year old grasp what matter means (or whatever word you care to mean for mass)? Forget the word mass for the moment—let’s make it a more interesting question. What makes stuff “stuff”? This becomes child’s play.

The conversation can wander all over the place. Do you have to be able to see it? How small can it be? Is air stuff? What’s not stuff?

Does a class have to arrive at a textbook definition of matter? Of course not, not in 2^nd  grade (or any grade, for that matter). The problem with the textbook definition is that the goal becomes learning the definition instead of learning science. 

If a 2^nd grade teacher does not feel comfortable discussing matter, then discuss “stuff”—you will wander all over the place, and if done right, learn about looking at the world. Don’t fret so much about not getting to the definition—what we’re doing now leads to the ignorance of certainty that keeps astrology and homeopathy alive. Is air stuff?

Learning science and memorizing definitions are not mutually exclusive. If the goal of a lesson becomes the definition, though, you lose the science. The problem is exacerbated by the concept of “a lesson”—science cannot be broken down into prescribed chunks of time. Traditional lesson plans are deadly to science education.

*Newton’s 3^rd law, of course—it’s a big deal.

Thermodynamics in elementary school

The cicadas are humming again. I think I hear what they're saying: "As much sun as there is today, there's a little less than yesterday." They crawl form underground chambers to share their oracles, our oracles. We know how the story ends.

The easy living of early June gives way to the inevitable entropy that follows. You can smell the still subtle fragrance of decay today, soon to be mixed with the sulfury celebration of our country. The Fourth of July is our nation's midsummer night of madness.

We are already harvesting for the winter.

***

Something happened a long time ago. That's how most stories start.

In science, whatever that something was, it was big, and "a long time ago" was just that--an incomprehensibly huge chunk of time between when the "something happened" and now.

If you don't keep that in mind, the story of science, as we know it now (and it will, of course, change), cannot hold.

It all boils down to the Laws of Thermodynamics. The laws are, in a sense, religious, not a trivial point.

Energy/mass cannot be created nor destroyed--we have what we have. Call mass/energy some random string of sounds--let's call it the Great Hedasha--and you found a sect.

The Great Hedasha is all. She cannot be destroyed, only transformed. She is part of everything in existence--she changes forms, but is always whole. The Great Hedasha, as she transforms, loses structure, loses form, becomes more amorphous with every passing moment. She becomes less useful (and "useful" is a huge word). Entropy rules.

Amen.

Unless, of course, she reverts to whatever She was 14 billion years ago or so--maybe the Hindus got that right. No way to know, of course.

***

Science is allusory--we need reference points to make it work. Allude means, literally, "to play with." Science plays with reality, creates stories that then bend back our perception of reality, then plays some more. The natural world, for all our confusion, is remarkably consistent.

When we teach science as reality, we kill it. When we take the play out of thinking, we lose whole universes. It is possible to engineer a better bridge without knowing a whole lot of science.

We may or may not need more engineers, depending on who you talk to--but we could use more science in our early grades.We teach a lot of pseudo-science. We expect kids to believe that the Earth is round, because we say so, that gravity sticks them to the "side" of the Earth because we say so, that the universe is billions of years old, because we say so.

None of those is easily demonstrated in a classroom--but entropy is. Things fall apart. It takes "energy" to put them back together.

 ***

How do we teach entropy? We mostly don't.

While the concepts are, at the heart, simple, the ramifications are huge, and involve things most of us would rather avoid--death, nothingness, everythingness, ommm, ommmm, ommmm.

We dabble with it in high school physics, but couch it in equations, and solving the equations, alas, becomes "science."

Obviously we're not going to toss calculus at kindergarteners. (Even Achieve.org is not that opaque--yet.) But we can still teach thermodynamics.


Things ultimately get cooler. Always. The seeming exceptions are when we warm things up by adding energy to smaller systems within larger ones.

We exist as our prideful orderly selves because the sun keeps streaming onto our planet. When the sun creeps away, as it does every year, things fall apart. Why? Because useful energy scatters, and has for billions of years.

That's about as far into the why you can expect from a young child, which is OK, but that's as far into the why as you can expect from a nuclear physicist.

Humpty Dumpty is all about entropy. As is science. As is life.


Kids know this already. We older folk often forget.

The cicada image is by Gardener41, used under CC
Humpty Dumpty is from Alice in Wonderland
The equations are from Statistical Geofluid Mechanics blog by François Ascani 

Thermometers, again

Thermometers work by magic, or may as well, given the  way we use them in class.

Lorin King, released under CC 3.0

We focus on how to read them, then how to convert one reading to the other. If a child barely has a grasp on Fahrenheit, it's really too much to ask her to convert to Celsius, not matter how much more sense it might make. Kelvin is just Celsius with a degree in pedantics.

A child can observe the triple point of water, at least two parts of it. (Water vapor is invisible--the fog you see is condensed water--droplets of liquid.) A child can tell when water is boiling.

Give a child a thermometer without numbers, without lines. Let her figure out why calibration matters. Otherwise a thermometer is just another talisman in a republic that cannot survive magical thinking.

The worksheet made by Lorin King, released under CC 3.0

Elementary education science, Part 1

I am sitting on a committee put together to help redesign our elementary school science curriculum.
I'll be tossing out various posts on the topic. The posts do not reflect the views of anyone except me.

By the end of Grade 4:

Science has unique norms for participation. These include adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism. 

NJ Core Curriculum Content Standards, 5.1.4.D.1, Science

A few of us in the district have a wonderful opportunity to help draft the science curriculum guidelines for early elementary students. We--teachers from various grade levels-- have been given professional time to work together to develop science education at the elementary level.

While I am a high school science teacher, I am leaning heavily on my former life as a pediatrician. You cannot separate science from perception, and perception gets colored by development.

Separating science as a discipline separate from language development does not make sense to me, at least not for the lunchbox crowd. It may be a subset of language, as fairy tales are a subset of story telling, but until children can master mathematics, Boolean logic, and other developmentally challenging tasks, pretending that they are little scientists is, well, ridiculous.

A lot of people are getting paid good money to promote the ridiculous.

***

What can a child know?

She can know what she observes, of course, but what she observes depends, in large part, on what she knows.  We frame our world more than we might realize.

Many of our children come to high school with what seem to be nonsensical ideas, but which reflect the thoughts of thousands of years of human thought--if  these thoughts are not consistent with the last few hundred years, we tell the children, without offering  much evidence, that they are wrong.

If a child believes she can see in absolute darkness, and many believe as much, telling her that is simply not so is not science education, it's indoctrination.

At the early grade levels, the standard listed above does not hold water. "Adopting a critical stance, demonstrating a willingness to ask questions and seek help, and developing a sense of trust and skepticism" should be the heart of all education, not the box labeled "science."

The photo has nothing to do with the post--I just like it.